


a rose by any other name (would still smell like feet)

by trill_gutterbug



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Canon-Typical Language and Attitudes, Discussion/Hints of Rape, F/M, Gender Issues, Gender or Sex Swap, Getting Together, Internalized Homophobia and Misogyny, Multi, No rape tho, Other, Sexism, Transphobia, UST, but if you can handle canon you'll do fine with this, gender essentialism, girl!Ray, just covering my bases because these are after all a bunch of gross boys!, pronoun confusion, these are not the sensitive and woke mass-murdering american marines you are looking for lol, these tags make it sound a lot darker than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 22:14:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19260199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trill_gutterbug/pseuds/trill_gutterbug
Summary: Brad spent a lot of time thinking about how it happened, because he couldn’t wrap his head around the rest of it - the effects of whatever trap Ray had triggered. He, Gunny Wynn, Rudy, and Lovell had walked the whole area with a fine tooth comb later, and found nothing. There was no sign of a canister or tripwire Ray could have stumbled over, no lingering smell, no ping on their chemical detectors. There was only the bewildering, incontrovertible evidence of the result.The result which was, right now, hollering a jaw-cracking yawn and fishing elbow deep in her MOPP to scratch balls that were no longer there.





	a rose by any other name (would still smell like feet)

**Author's Note:**

> I have taken what might be described as extreme liberties with military procedures and realities in this fic, not to mention general reality. Don't @ me lol, I know. There's also a lot of insensitive language and attitudes going on, and plenty of gender essentialism both internalised and externalised, both explicitly mentioned and not. So beware! 
> 
> The unofficial subtitle of this fic is "Hey fellas is it gay to be in love with your buddy if he magically turns into a woman?" 
> 
> An extreme debt of gratitude, as always, to both [lingua](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua) and [kaa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot) for babying me through the month(s) I was married to this fic.
> 
> I am also planning a sequel, but I don't have a timeline on when it might show up!

**\- Now -  
**

Later, Brad couldn’t be sure exactly what he’d seen. The memory was skewed through the adrenaline-tinged kaleidoscope of after-action recall, time folded back on itself, his body seeming to have moved impossibly, details sanded down to broad strokes. He remembered watching Ray stumble back, his voice cutting off mid-word, clawing at his face. Brad remembered skidding to a halt, or maybe lurching forward, his mind leaping to every conclusion at once. He remembered trying to say, whispering through numb lips, “Gas.” And then, louder, scrambling for his mask, “Gas, gas, gas!” as the platoon burst into action around him.

He knew he reacted properly, smartly, there was no doubt of that. He just couldn’t remember doing it. He and Poke had gotten to Ray first, and Doc Bryan ten seconds later. Brad knew he’d put Ray’s mask on for him, because Ray had been lying dazed, bare-faced, coughing. Brad knew he had assumed a defensive covering posture while Doc and Poke carried Ray back toward the platoon line. He’d followed them, scanning the horizon, the boulders and scrub brush, for movement. He’d seen nothing.

He spent a lot of time thinking about how it happened, because he couldn’t wrap his head around the rest of it - the effects of whatever trap Ray had triggered. Brad, Gunny Wynn, Rudy, and Lovell had walked the whole area with a fine tooth comb later, and found nothing. There was no sign of a canister or tripwire Ray could have stumbled over, no lingering smell, no ping on their chemical detectors. There was only the bewildering, incontrovertible evidence of the result.

The result which was, right now, hollering a jaw-cracking yawn and fishing elbow deep in her MOPP to scratch balls that were no longer there. "You ever hear of someone getting an allergy to sleep?" Ray said loudly as she came toward the humvee, packing her empty camelbak under the arm not digging into her trousers. "I had that nap earlier and now I've got a rash."

"Where?" Trombley asked from the back seat. Brad heard him lean forward with interest.

He snapped, "Stow it, Trombley," but Ray didn't seem to have heard, anyway.

She pulled her hand out of the suit, sniffed her fingers, and made a face. "It fucking _burns,_ dude, it feels like that time I poured lemon juice on my sunburn." She hauled open the driver door and clambered in, up on her knees on the seat. "Hey, Trombley, hand me that water can."

Trombley did, letting it bang Reporter's shoulder on the way by. Reporter said, "Ouch!"

"Why the fuck would you put lemon juice on a sunburn?" Brad demanded.

Ray shrugged, wrestling the can over the center console onto her seat. "I dunno, someone said it worked."

"Was this 'someone' a bitter enemy of yours?"

"Yeah," Ray said, popping the top off the can. "My grandma."

Brad realized belatedly what was about to happen. "Do that outside, you're going to dump it everywhere."

Ray rolled her eyes. "No, I'm fucking not." But she slid backwards out of the humvee and took the can with her.

"Use your fucking head," Brad said.

"I guess I better, I only got the one, now." Ray wrinkled her nose, squinting up at Brad. Brad tried, as he always did, to wrestle the face he was looking at into matching the one he'd know for two years. The differences weren't so enormous. It was like someone had traced Ray's old face with onion paper, then redrawn the lines a bit wrong. The chin was sharper, the jaw smoother, the cheekbones softer, even her hairline was changed, but the eyebrows and nose and dimples were the same. Her mouth and eyes hadn’t changed at all. Sometimes Brad barely noticed it from the corner of his eye, almost forgetting for long minutes at a time, and then she would speak, or Brad would turn to ask a question, and -

"Where's your rash?" Trombley asked again, leaning out his window this time.

Ray turned her squint on him. "You'll have to upgrade your membership to $19.99 a month to find that out, Trombley."

Trombley slumped back again. "I’m just asking," he muttered.

Brad craned around to scowl at him. "Yeah, well, don't. You know the rule."

Trombley looked mutinous, lower lip jutting.

"Which rule is that, exactly?" asked Reporter. Not because he didn't know, but because he liked to goad Brad into giving direct quotes about things he considered bizarre or amusing. He got this stupid look on his face sometimes, a little grin like he'd stumbled into a parliament of talking owls and couldn't believe what he was seeing, or how rich he was going to get off them.

“The rule is _Don’t be fucking creepy,_ ” Walt called down from up top.

It wasn’t, but that was close enough. Brad was glad Walt answered for him, because he didn’t actually have a direct quote on hand. The rule was largely Team One-centered and ambiguous enough for Brad to enforce under whatever circumstance he needed to, but what it boiled down to was: _Don’t make this situation unbearable enough that the LT has to Make A Call._ Usually, of course, Ray was the primary transgressor of this rule.

Brad heard Reporter’s pencil scratching away. As always, he dearly wished he could shut his eyes and pretend none of this was happening, but since that wasn’t an option, he settled for just shutting his eyes. “Is your rash bad enough to see Doc about?”

“Eh,” Ray said. There was an ominous sloshing sound, then a quiet, _“Whoops.”_ Brad kept his eyes shut. “Nah, it’s just because I tried to shave my bush yesterday.”

Brad’s eyes popped open. “Why the fuck would you -” He stopped. The rule also applied to him.

“I couldn’t get a good look at my twat!”

Reporter’s pencil scratched faster.

Ray went on. “It was a fucking jungle, dude, I haven’t shaved that shit in years. And I kept pissing all over myself.”

Brad suspected that had more to do with Ray’s demonstrable, bewildering inability to squat properly than any pubic hair issue, but he didn’t say so.

“Gross,” Trombley said.

“Exactly,” said Ray.

She set the water can upright and flipped the cap back on. The blouse of her MOPP was flapping open, because in the infinite wisdom of whoever invented the fucking things, the whole suit had to be removed, suspenders and all, to take a shit. Or, in Ray’s case, a piss. She was wearing her same old gear beneath, the sweat-stained green t-shirt with _Person_ inscribed on the right breast, and it wasn’t much baggier on her now than it had ever been. Brad could see the loose movement of her tits under it. He’d seen them naked - everyone in the platoon had - so unfortunately he knew exactly what they looked like. Tiny, kind of pointy, little brown nipples, some inexplicable stretch marks faded silver with apparent age.

In Brad’s headset, Fick said, _“All victors, this is Hitman Two Actual. Be advised, Bravo is stepping off in five mikes."_

“Company's Oscar Mike in five,” Brad relayed aloud.

Ray said, “Of fucking course,” and lifted the water can into the humvee to pass it back to Trombley.

This time, when Trombley whacked Reporter with it, Reporter said, “Okay, really?”

“What,” said Trombley.

Brad resisted the urge to push his thumb into the throbbing spot between his eyes. He lifted his M4 into the window. “Alright, kids,” he said. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

**\- Day Two -  
**

“This isn’t exactly the sort of thing I can just sweep under the rug, Brad,” Fick said, voice lowered. He was resting his elbow on the hood of the humvee next to Brad, leaning over the map they were ostensibly studying. “It’ll be a miracle if fucking Mattis hasn’t heard about it by tonight.”

They’d finished with the map a while ago, but Brad pretended to be scrutinizing it as well. He didn’t have to fake the frown of concentration on his face. “I realize that, sir, but without explicit confirmation from an officer on the scene, it’s just going to sound like dumbass gossip. No one will pay attention if we don’t act like they should.”

Fick rubbed at his face beneath the rim of his kevlar. “I don’t know, Brad. Don’t we have an obligation to report it? Medically? Or scientifically, at least?”

Brad stared at him. “Person isn’t a fucking science experiment.”

Fick looked up sharply. “That’s not what I meant. I mean that this is, to put it mildly, unprecedented. For Person’s own sake, it deserves to be investigated. What if he changes back tomorrow, or changes into something even weirder? What if there are side effects?”

Brad snorted. “Besides the obvious, sir?”

Fick smiled back, just as humorless. “Yes, besides the obvious. I can barely wrap my head around this whole thing, Brad, and I sure as hell can’t predict what might happen next. Can you?”

Brad breathed out through his teeth, taking a moment. He had to be smart about this. Methodical. “I think the next step should be Person’s decision. If he’s not combat-compromised, then it shouldn’t matter to Command.”

“In theory, I agree with you.” Fick looked worried, even more terminally than usual. “But we both know that reason and rationale have never been guiding principles of the USMC. Recon isn’t even open to women, for Christ’s sake. This is a major fuckup, either on the part of nature, God, or the enemy, and it’ll be our asses if the higher ups get wind that we deliberately concealed that kind of intel.”

“Not to speak out of turn, sir,” said Brad, “but I’ve never known you to put Command’s opinion of you ahead of the wellbeing of your -” He hesitated. “- men.”

Fick regarded him, one eye narrowed against the morning sun cresting the roof of the humvee. “Well,” he said at last, ruefully, “I guess neither have I.”

The agreement was made, provisionally. Fick wouldn’t officially report anything aside from a possible chemical attack - vector unknown, one nonlethal casualty successfully treated on-site - until and unless he was specifically questioned by Command, or unless the situation took a drastic turn. He hadn’t looked particularly sanguine about it, and Brad couldn’t blame him, because he felt the same queasy uncertainty. It was insanity, plain and simple, to hide this, Fick was right. Maybe there would be long term consequences for Ray, either physically or legally, if the situation was left untended. Maybe they were doing a major disservice to the entirety of human knowledge by keeping it quiet. Maybe it was, even more importantly, a danger to the mission not to report the possible existence of chemical weapons that could do this kind of thing. Brad didn’t know. All he knew was that Ray had looked up at him, panicked like Brad had never seen, and begged, “Don’t let them kick me out. Fucking promise me, Brad, don’t let them.”

And Brad, helpless to do anything else, had promised.

**\- Now -  
**

Ray’s singing voice was not improved by the transformation, but that didn’t stop her from testing the possibilities of her new range. Right now, it was Cyndi Lauper on the chopping block. Brad warbled along with her, but his voice cracked long before hers did on the high notes, to her immense delight.

“You sound fucking prepubescent,” Brad said, while she cackled.

“You sound fucking jealous,” she said.

“You both sound fucking gay,” Trombley said.

Brad, smirked, looking out the window, because he knew what was coming.

“Hey,” said Ray over her shoulder, “it’s not gay if one of you has a dick and the other one has a cunt, is it, you retard?”

It was sharper than she usually spoke to Trombley, but Brad didn’t intervene. Over the past two weeks, he’d seen Trombley recover from his initial silent horror at the situation, and, growing more comfortable, grow equally bolder in his derision. Trombley eyed Ray sometimes with a narrow, predatory calculation that raised Brad’s hackles. Reporter had noticed it too. Yesterday, after Trombley called Ray a dumb bitch in passing, Reporter had said quietly to Brad, “I guess I’m not lowest on the totem pole anymore, huh?”

It wasn’t the name calling that was troubling, Brad had realized, watching Trombley and Ray head toward H&S to pick up a crate of 203 rounds, bickering the whole way. It was the tone. There had been a viciousness to it Brad had never heard Trombley direct at one of their own guys before.

“A faggot’s a faggot,” Trombley pronounced from the back seat.

Ray scoffed. “Then quit staring at my fucking tits all the time, dipshit.”

Trombley didn’t reply. Brad glanced back to see him staring mulishly out the window, hunched over his SAW. He didn’t say another word until they stopped for the night, and only then to mutter, “Yes, Sergeant,” when Brad sent him to borrow an entrenching tool from Poke’s humvee.

Ray was still in the driver’s seat, fiddling at the radio with her face screwed up. It had shit the bed ten minutes before Fick called a halt, which he’d had to do by relaying a shouted message up the line to Brad’s victor.

“You motherfucking goat’s ass-licking sonofabitch, you need to fucking cooperate,” Ray was instructing the radio.

Brad propped his hip against the door jamb next to her, peering over the roof of the humvee to double check that Reporter was on the other side of camp talking to Garza, and that Walt was still in the process of taking what he’d claimed would be the longest piss of his life when he climbed down off the Mk 19.

“Hey, so,” Brad began.

Ray groaned, looking at him with her upper lip curled like an irritated donkey. “That doesn’t sound like the start of anything I want to hear.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to say it, either.” Brad shifted his M4 so it wasn’t stuck between his hip and the victor. “But if Trombley’s giving you any trouble -”

Ray cut him off with a dismissive sound. “Please. I’ll rip that little psycho’s head off and shit down his neck if he pisses me off enough.”

Brad nodded. “Alright, well, maybe don’t do that. Maybe talk to me if it gets that bad.”

“It won't." Ray rolled her eyes. “He’s just having a breakdown because he wants to fuck me and it makes him mad.”

Brad’s eyebrows rose. “You think that’s it?”

Ray stared at him. Her face took on a strange quality in the evening light, at once eye-catching in its familiarity and monstrous in its lack thereof. A part of Brad wanted to rub his thumb over her thin mouth, investigate the lobes of her ears and the wrinkle between her eyebrows and the underside of her jaw for recognizable details. The other part wanted to look pointedly at the horizon and avoid the mindfuck altogether.

“What fucking planet are you living on, dude? I’ve got tits.”

“Yeah,” said Brad. He was well aware. He had to swallow against a sudden flush of angry embarrassment. “Stop giving him ideas.”

“He’s giving himself ideas.” Ray’s hand was still clutching the front plate of the radio. Her fingers were white-knuckled on the base of the headset cord.

“You’ve been taking your shirt off any time someone asks!” Brad protested. “Cut it the fuck out, it’s not helping anything.”

“Brad,” Ray said. She made an _Are you fucking retarded?_ face, and carefully enunciated: “I’ve got.  _Tits._ "

Brad looked away over the roof of the humvee. He kind of wanted to punch something, and that probably meant he needed to go take a walk. “Listen,” he said, very calmly. “I’m just saying that I understand this is weird as fuck and, against all odds, you’ve decided to roll with it, which is honestly very commendable. But shit can get out of hand really fucking fast, you know that.”

“What, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye?” Ray did not look or sound convinced.

Brad considered it. “Until certain details make it up to Command, or until someone starts getting ideas you don’t want them to get, yeah.”

Ray gave him the kind of shit-eating grin that made Brad’s nebulous desire to punch something transform into a very specific desire to punch a very specific person. Person with a capital P.

“You can’t rape the willing, Brad,” she said.

Brad shut his eyes. He took a very slow, deep breath. “I’m going to go take a walk."

**\- Day One -  
**

At first, of course, it was a fucking disaster. Doc Bryan tore new assholes into the first few guys who got too close to where Ray was laid out in the shade of a cammie net. He snarled about contamination, then about medical containment, and finally, white-faced, just started snapping, “Back the fuck off.”

The only ones he let through eventually, besides Stiney, were Brad, Fick, and Wynn. By that point, sweating in the clammy cling of his gas mask, Brad had cycled through every worst case scenario he could think of and come out the other side into detached acceptance. Ray was going to die, probably, with his face eaten off by acidic blisters, or vomiting up shit. Maybe he was paralyzed, or brain dead, or would never speak again. Brad briefly tried to comfort himself with that last one, but at that point he couldn’t even joke to himself.

Fick looked as sick as Brad felt, Wynn grimly silent at his elbow, but none of them said a word as Doc led them behind Team Three’s humvee into the little lean-to set up over Ray. Stiney crouched protectively nearby, looking, even through his gas mask, like he’d just shaken Satan’s hand. Ray was lying on the bare sand, eyes closed, his MOPP mostly open, breathing steadily. His mask was off, but Brad was so preoccupied by being relieved there were no visible signs of melted flesh or blood that it took him a long moment to notice what _was_ wrong.

Fick seemed to have already seen it. “Doc, what’s going on?” His voice was indistinct through the mask, but Brad understood him with the peculiar sharpness of combat clarity.

“I have no fucking idea,” Doc said. His eyes were extremely bright behind his mask’s lens. “All his vitals are good, he’s perfectly stable. Unconscious, but otherwise normal. Except…”

“What the fuck,” Brad finally managed to say. “What’s - Why is...” He couldn’t even articulate what he was seeing.

Ray’s face was… _wrong._ That was the only thing Brad could figure out. The change was subtle, but not unnoticeable. He was more clean-shaven than Brad thought he’d been since he was probably twelve, which was surprising considering that, last Brad saw him, he’d been sporting a five o’clock shadow Brad had been sure Sixta was going to _smell_ at three hundred paces. He was still pimply and angular, pale, asymmetrical, but… different. Just different. A thousand possibilities raced through Brad’s head at once: some kind of palsy fucking with the muscles in Ray’s face; a flesh-eating bioagent operating under the skin; a weird allergic swelling; an alien bodysnatch.

Doc laughed, completely devoid of amusement. He sounded borderline manic. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this, I can’t even give you a guess. I need you guys to tell me I’m not going fucking crazy.”

“I…” said Fick. He was staring, head cocked. He didn’t seem able to look away. “Doc, is that…”

Wynn whistled suddenly, a single awestruck note filtering through his mask.

“Breasts?” Doc snapped, and that's when Brad noticed the rest of it.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

“Oh, it doesn’t stop there!” said Doc, savagely cavalier.

“What…” Brad tried again. He couldn't understand what Doc was implying. It just wasn't computing. He stared at the shape of Ray's chest, which he’d thought was the result of his t-shirt lying strangely. There was swelling of some kind, certainly. But…

Doc crouched next to Ray and peeled up his shirt. On Ray's other side, Stiney watched with a resigned, miserable sort of fascination.

"What the hell," Brad whispered. He'd seen Ray shirtless that morning, and hundreds of times before. He’d sure never had… those.

But Doc wasn't done. Ray's suspenders were already unclipped, so Doc only had to pull the trousers out from under his ass and down his thighs. The boxers underneath were askew, like Doc had already peeled them off and then hastily yanked them back up. Brad thought he should brace himself for what was coming next, but that just wasn't possible.

"Uhhh," said Fick, sounding like he had a direct line to Brad's internal monologue. "Where's, uhhh. What happened to, uhhh…"

"That, gentlemen," said Doc, "is a set of fucking female genitalia."

It _looked_ like a flat patch of hair to Brad, but one way or another, it sure wasn't a dick, something Brad also knew for sure had been there just this morning.

"Are you sure?" asked Fick, over Wynn’s single bark of disbelieving laughter.

Brad experienced a muffled sensation of gratitude that Fick and Wynn were the people next to him for this. Brad didn't think he could speak to save his own ass right now, much less say anything relevant or intelligible.

Doc nodded. "I'll spare all of us a detailed investigation at the moment, but trust me. I know a vulva when I see one."

Brad's brain wasn't buying it. There wasn't blood or gore or anything else to suggest Ray's dick had been somehow blown off his body without breaching his MOPP, but it was the only logical explanation. It was all Brad could think. That, and _Holy shit, he's going to be so fucking mad._

**\- Now -  
**

They rolled through a town the next day, twenty klicks ahead of RCT1. It was evident pretty quickly that, if there were enemy forces around, they were staying out of sight. The convoy crawled unopposed at fifteen miles an hour through the narrow streets. Brad scrutinized windows and rooftops and alleyways, but all he saw were a few children waving from a side street and two old women standing outside a store. It was just as likely, considering how things were going lately, that reports of fedayeen in the city were in error, or that they’d been present yesterday and since pulled out.

“Walt,” Brad called up, “you see that glint on the roof of the green building, ten o’clock?”

The Mk 19 rattled as Walt swiveled it. “Yeah,” he replied. “Can’t make it out.”

“Trombley?” From the passenger seat, Brad couldn’t swing his rifle around far enough to glass anything on the left side of the victor.

After a moment, Trombley reported, “Nothin’, Sergeant. A bucket, I think. No one up there.”

“Holy _shit_!” Ray barked.

Brad leapt, jerking his rifle up. “What?” he demanded, eyes darting wildly to find the enemy Ray had spotted.

“I just saw myself in that window reflection back there.” Ray was bouncing in her seat, trying to look back over her shoulder. “Gabe wasn’t kidding, I make a fucking butt-ugly chick!” She laughed, turning to grin at Brad with both dimples.

“Fucking Christ,” Brad said, blowing out his breath. “Don’t do that, Person, you scared the shit out of me.”

She was unrepentant. “When I get home, I’m gonna have to throw out all my mirrors.” She shook her head. “Man. It’s true, Marines will fuck anything.”

Before Brad could even begin to respond to _that,_ Reporter chimed in, offering his unsolicited backseat opinion with the urbane equanimity of a politician’s PR manager. “You’re not ugly. You’ve just got a certain… rawboned appeal.” Brad could hear the grin in his voice. Even _he_ couldn’t take himself seriously.

“‘A rawboned appeal,’” Ray repeated, sounding disgusted. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, you goddamn faggot?”

Trombley said, without taking his eyes off his SAW’s sights, “I thought it wasn’t gay if one of you has a pussy.”

“Shut up, Trombley,” Ray said.

“You look… interesting,” Reporter explained. “Maybe not _beautiful,_ in a classical sense, but like you’ve got personality. There’s a genuineness to your features.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brad sighed, scanning buildings. “You quoting that from the literary novel you’ve been working on for eight years about an English professor who fucks his students?”

Ray laughed. Reporter didn’t respond, but Brad knew he was probably back there still smiling to himself. He only had a few merits, in Brad’s opinion, but one of them was a general lack of reactionary bravado.

“I wish we did have a mirror, though,” said Ray contemplatively. “I want to look at my twat while I jerk off.”

“Is it called jerking off when chicks do it?” Trombley asked.

Ray shrugged. “I dunno. I guess.”

Brad could not possibly maintain combat effectiveness with this conversation going on beside him. “Shut up, Ray. Watch the road.”

“I am, I am. Hey, what do you think of this for a porn title: _Ugly Chick with Half Shaved Bush Gets a Train Run on Her by Unwashed Military Hunks_.” She leaned forward over the steering wheel, cackling. “Or, no, wait. _Marine Bitch with Rawboned Appeal Dogpiled by Jarheads._ How about that?”

“Ray…” said Brad.

“That one’s got a good ring to it, in my professional opinion,” Reporter said. “I’d review it.”

“You want to fuck dudes in the Company?” Trombley sounded as repulsed as he did intrigued.

"Fuck no, I don't want to fuck dudes in the Company! This is a business proposition, and a core tenet of the American Dream is that you have to suffer to succeed. This just might be the cross I have to bear to retire in style with some kind of golden cock award."

"An AVN Award?" Reporter suggested.

"Yeah, that's the one."

"Shut the fuck up, all of you," Brad said. "Trombley, watch your goddamn sector. Rolling Stone, keep your trap shut, she doesn't need encouragement."

Silence fell over the humvee. Brad realized, too late, what he'd said. He bit his tongue and scanned the road. A minute later, when Ray started humming _Girls Just Wanna Have Fun_ under her breath, Brad didn't say a word.

**\- Day Three -  
**

“Brah,” was all Lilley said, which sort of summed up the situation.

There was a lengthy moment of stunned silence.

“What the holy fuck, dude,” said Christeson finally, almost reverential with disbelief.

“I know,” Ray said, holding her t-shirt up under her chin, staring down at her own bare chest.

“Nah,” said Chaffin, shaking his head. “Nah, I don’t buy it. I don’t fucking buy it, motherfucker, you’ve been hiding this the whole time, you fucking tranny.”

Ray pulled a face. “You think I could keep this shit to myself? No way, buddy. You’ve seen me buckass naked a dozen times. Listen to my fucking voice, I sound like I retroactively skipped puberty."

She was right. It kept bending Brad's ear to hear her speak, at once Ray and not Ray. The intonations the same, the words and cadences the same, but the timbre off entirely.

Fick, standing next to Brad off to the side, watched this exchange occur with a look on his face like he’d eaten bad Mexican food. Brad thought he himself probably looked like he’d sampled the same dish. Both of them had protested when Ray insisted on sharing the new goods with the class, but in the end Fick wouldn’t give Ray a direct order about it, and Brad reluctantly realized the necessity of it. The subtly different shape of Ray’s face and shoulders and waist and chest might not be noticeable to anyone from Battalion, or even their sister Companies, but no one in Bravo could possibly miss it. Trying to deny something had happened would just piss everyone off before they inevitably found out anyway, Ray had argued, with eventual success. (And, the argument continued: tits.)

“Yeah, that’s true…” said Garza slowly. “I definitely would have noticed all this.”

“Your fuckin’ _dick_ is gone?” Chaffin demanded. “The whole fucking thing?”

Ray jammed the hem of her t-shirt between her teeth to free both hands and undid the buckle of her MOPP trousers, the suspenders already dangling around her skinny hips. Brad shut his eyes when she wrestled the fatigues down. He’d already seen it, but it wasn’t any less mind-bending now. He didn’t need another look. The sound of the platoon seeing it was more than enough.

“Yeah!” said Ray, muffled with her shirt in her mouth, but loud enough to hear over the chorus of _I don’t fucking believe it_ and _Damn, dawg!_ and _Holy titfucking Christ_ and startled Portuguese and a cacophony of shocked whistles, howls, and horrified gasps. “Think I could fake this?”

Brad opened his eyes, finally, but only once the furor died down. Fick had given everyone an informal briefing before Ray started dropping trou, so although they’d all technically known what to expect, Brad didn’t think a single one of them had believed a word of it. Seeing was another story entirely. He watched Christeson, so red he looked like he might break out in hives, squirm with the fit of his trousers, and he wasn't the only one affected. Baptista was grinning from ear to ear, making no attempt to be discreet with his adjustments. Trombley seemed on the verge of either fainting or puking.

“It goes without saying,” Fick interjected now, raising his voice to be heard, “that this situation is delicate and novel, and although I am giving no one official orders about anything, it would be in the best interests of everyone involved to maintain discretion about certain details, for what I think are obvious reasons. Please consider what you say about Corporal Person’s private medical business and who you say it to.”

He didn't look at Reporter as he said this, but Brad did. Reporter was rabidly scribbling in his notebook, glancing between it and Ray so fast he was going to give himself whiplash. He'd been present for Fick's debrief, but Brad had also taken him aside beforehand and provided his own explanation of events, concluding with a detailed description of the consequences for premature breaches of confidence. It was a losing battle, Brad knew that; he couldn't stop a journalist from tattling any more than he could stop a dog from barking, but he hoped the inevitable could at least be delayed until the fallout was more manageable.

Poke said, so incredulously his voice nearly cracked, “You think we can keep this shit _secret?_ From who? Command? Battalion? The fucking USMC? Fat fucking chance, dawg.”

Fick shut his mouth, looking pained. Brad took over for him, repeating the line of logic he’d been studiously telling himself for two days. “No one’s going to believe it without seeing it, and no one in Command has the time or inclination to be chasing around half-baked stories about some Marine magically losing his dick.” Reflexively, he shot Ray an apologetic grimace. “We collectively do our best to keep it off Command’s radar, they won’t think twice about some stupid jarhead rumor making the rounds.”

"Christ, I don't know," said Pappy. He was staring at the bare, pale length of Ray's body like his eyes had been surgically attached to it, his brow crinkled into an accordion of disbelief. "This is Person we're talking about. Even if the rest of us sewed our mouths shut right now, he couldn't keep his trap shut to save his own scrawny ass."

Ray flipped Pappy the bird.

"Well, that's on Person, then," Brad said.

"Nah, dawg,” said Poke, “that's on all of us when Command finds out we been hiding this."

Brad avoided looking at Fick, because he was pretty sure Fick would be pointedly _not_ looking back at him with an ‘I told you so’ face.

Poke jabbed his hand in the direction of Ray's… everything. "What the fuck happened?" He said it in an almost pleading tone, like, _Would someone_ please _explain how this kind of bullshit could be allowed to occur, cosmically speaking?_

Doc Bryan, who was standing beside Brad and Fick with his arms crossed, had given his own succinct report alongside Fick's. There hadn't been much to say. Something unknown happened, maybe chemical, maybe not. This was the medically impossible result, end of story. He’d delivered this pronouncement as bluntly as he did anything, and didn’t look any more agreeable to taking questions now. He scowled at Poke. “No fucking idea, man,” he said. “Don’t ask me, I just work here.”

It continued to devolve, more or less, from there. Brad watched the situation progress essentially how he’d predicted, the men cycling through varied responses of general incredulity, anger, disgust, excitement, vile suggestion, and bewildered silence, interspersed with some religious and superstitious invocation, and, in Rudy’s case, verbal musing on the ever-mysterious, ever-amazing nature of universal dharma. Ray bore up under it well, all things considered. Shockingly well. Ever since she’d woken from her brief, inexplicable coma, she’d been taking everything shockingly well. It was making Brad jumpy.

“What the fuck are we going to call you now?” Chaffin finally demanded, that belligerent edge to his voice that Brad was well accustomed to and normally didn’t give a second thought. This time, it put his hackles up. “Raylene? Rayna?” He snorted. “Bitch?”

Ray’s voice didn’t falter, but even with her newly restructured face, Brad recognized the tightening at the corner of her mouth. “I have a name, dipshit.”

“Yeah, you got a whole lot of stuff.” This was accompanied by an up-and-down look that nearly made Brad take an instinctive, angry step forward, even though none of what Chaffin said was worse than what he himself had been thinking for the last thirty-six hours.

“She’s a chick now,” Leon interjected, shrugging. “At least Ray’s a chick’s name too.”

“Nah, man, that’s bullshit,” said the unexpected source of Q-Tip. He’d been as vocal in his surprise as any of them, repeating _Screwby_ at varying volumes, but now he spoke with a casual laziness. He tapped his temple. “It’s all in the mind, bro.”

Leon swiveled to give him a bewildered look. “What the hell does that mean?”

Q-Tip raised one shoulder. "We just making all this shit up as we go, ain't nothing set in stone. My cousin switched genders. She says you just feel it."

Ray made a retching noise. She still had her t-shirt hiked up and her whole bush out. “This isn’t like your fucking tranny cousin, Stafford. My dick was stolen against my will, I didn’t pay some pervert doctor eighty grand to chop it off and sell it on the black market.”

“Holy shit, do they do that?” asked Garza.

Q-Tip ignored that, although Ray gave Garza a quick, frenzied nod and an ominous eyebrow waggle. She mouthed, _Big money._

“That’s all I’m saying, man,” Q-Tip said. “You tell me.”

“Honestly, I don’t give a fuck!” Ray finally let her t-shirt drop so she could put her hands on her bare hips. “Call me whatever the hell you want. I _do_ have a fucking pussy.”

“Just keep that nasty shit far away from me and we’re good,” Chaffin said, already turning on his heel.

“Yeah, I will, thanks, I don’t need another strain of herpes.” Ray threw a sloppy, sarcastic salute at his back.

“Agreed,” said Poke, giving Ray a dirty look, although Brad was pretty sure that was due more to Poke imagining Ray having sex in general than the existence of any specific genitalia, or lack thereof.

Garza was shaking his head, blinking behind his glasses. “Man, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not gonna have any trouble from me, you make an ugly-ass girl.”

“Cool,” said Ray. “At least I can see straight, four-eyes.”

Garza nodded agreeably. “Yeah, so just wait until you get a look at yourself.”

“I’m out,” said Christopher, throwing up his hands. He'd been looking queasy and violated for a few minutes now. “I need to go count my fucking toes for a while.”

Ray gave him a thumbs up as he left.

“Ray,” Brad said, when it looked like the group was going to continue dispersing. “Come on.” He didn’t look at the feeling too closely, but the thought of going back to the humvee and leaving Ray here with the platoon made his spine itch. He turned away, knowing Ray would follow, then turned back. “And do up your goddamn pants.”

**\- Now -  
**

“Hey,” Brad said, when Ray walked past him later that evening. He was sitting against the rear wheel of the humvee, squeezing his MRE bag to break up the meat clumps so they’d have a snowball’s chance of heating all the way through. It was quote-unquote meatloaf in the cards tonight. Although they were all on two rations a day now, no one had anything left but the dregs: spaghetti, meatloaf, beef fajita, lentil stew. It was a serious fucking bummer.

Ray did a little half turn, walking a step backwards to look at him. She was smeared with mud all down one cheek and the side of her neck, swinging a wrench in one hand. Her eyes were bloodshot with dust allergies. “What’s up?”

“I’m sorry about earlier.”

Her expression didn’t change. “What happened earlier?”

Brad shook the MRE by one corner to move the chunks around. “I, uh. I called you she.”

Ray wrinkled her nose. “Dude. I told you two weeks ago I don’t care.”

Brad shrugged. His mouth tasted weird, and he had the fleeting thought that perhaps it wasn’t anticipatory dread of the MRE condiments, but guilt. If guilt had a taste, maybe this was it, because here he was pretending to be a good guy and apologizing for letting on about something he did a thousand times a day in his head without regret.

Ray looked at him like she was trying to figure out what smelled funny. “Okay, you were agreeing with Chaffin about this shit like ten days ago. Why change your mind?”

Brad took a deep breath. He hadn’t expected to have to explain himself, and now that he did, he had no idea what to say. He just knew he was all knotted up inside, and apologizing seemed like the key to fixing that. “I don’t know,” he said. He stared at his MRE. “It’s all fucked up, and I’m sorry.”

Ray didn’t respond for such a long time - six seconds - that Brad finally looked up, concerned. She was staring out at the horizon, one eye shut, tapping the wrench into her hand. She didn’t look mad. “I like it,” she finally said. “Keep doing it.”

Brad blinked. “What?”

She turned her narrowed eye on him, shrugging. “It’s fine,” she said. “Go nuts.” Brad opened his mouth to reply, although he didn’t know what he was going to say, but Ray cut him off, lifting her chin at his MRE. “What you got?”

Brad said, “...Meatloaf.”

Ray nodded sympathetically. “Gross.” And then she turned and left.

Brad stared after her. The exchange was surprising enough, but he’d never known Ray to depart in the middle of a conversation when there was potential ranting to be had. “Huh,” he said softly.

That night, when Gunny Wynn shook him awake to tell him ruefully they'd received orders to move a hundred meters farther down the MSR, Brad got up to collect his team. Trombley was asleep in the humvee, Reporter was asleep under it, and Walt was on watch up top.

"Where's Ray?" Brad said, hardly able to think, much less speak, over the pounding exhaustion headache ringing in his ears.

Walt made a face. It was the kind of face that said _I know a bad thing, and I don't think you want to hear it, but I don't know whether you'll be more upset if I tell you or dodge the question._

Brad shut his eyes briefly. His rifle was so heavy, and his head was so sore. "Walt…"

"Over at Pappy's victor," Walt said, grimacing. "Give it five minutes, Brad."

Brad regarded him. Walt's face was now saying _Listen, this is for your own good, let's be reasonable about this._ Brad spun around and headed for Pappy's humvee.

It took him a minute to find Ray, because the humvee was backed up close to the berm, and she was around the far side. Although the moon was bright overheard, he heard the scene before he saw it, and what he heard was Manimal saying, “Come on, pinch ‘em a little,” and Ray replying, sounding offended, “Pinch your own, asshole.”

Brad came to a stop by the hood of the humvee, his brain still catching up to what his eyes were seeing. Ray was leaned back against the side of the humvee, helmetless, slouching with her legs braced in the sand, holding her shirt up. It was a posture Brad should have been used to, considering how often she’d taken to flashing the platoon, but it still made him cringe, flushing hot from head to toe. He never got used to it, the incongruity and the reflexive appeal all snarled up together. He always had to turn away so he wouldn’t stare, or rush over and yank her shirt down. This time, though, the thing that caught his eye wasn’t Ray’s bare breasts, but Manimal, who was standing a few feet away, eyes glued to Ray, dick in hand, jerking off. He barely even twitched when Brad came around the humvee, just glanced over quickly, hand not slowing.

Ray, however, nearly leapt out of her skin. She dropped her shirt, straightening. “Uh,” she said.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Brad said.

“Hey, come on!” Manimal said.

Brad’s vision was narrowing. He felt very calm. “Ray, what the hell are you doing?”

“Uhhh,” she said again.

Manimal, dick still in hand, made an angry gesture. “What the fuck, man, I was almost finished.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Brad. “Are you - Is this -”

“Not what it looks like?” Ray offered.

“If it looks like me not getting to nut, I’m gonna be real pissed off,” Manimal growled.

Brad rounded on him. “Jacks, get the fuck out of here.” And, when Manimal opened his mouth to protest, shoulders squaring, he barked, “That’s a goddamn order.”

Manimal’s mouth snapped shut. He looked riotous, like he would much prefer to take a swing at Brad’s face than obey. But, after a moment, he obediently yanked his pants shut, shot Ray a nasty look, and stormed away. A deadly silence descended. Brad’s headache had miraculously fled.

“So, hey, listen,” Ray began.

Brad lifted a hand. “Are you fucking Manimal,” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to give it a questioning intonation. He could barely bring himself to ask.

“Ugh, _no,_ ” Ray said. “It was just a business transaction, homes, a little tit for tat. Like a peep show, you know? All behind glass, no touching.”

Brad wasn’t sure if that was worse than what he’d been halfway expecting, or not. “ _Why_?”

Ray reached into the front pocket of her open MOPP and pulled out an MRE packet.

“Are you _shitting me,_ ” Brad said. “What is that, a fucking poptart? You’re letting that illiterate troglodyte jack off on you for a fucking _poptart_?”

“No,” Ray snapped. There was real anger in her voice suddenly. She pulled her MOPP shut with a jerky motion, stepping forward to slap the MRE against Brad’s chest. “Here.” She let it go, and Brad reflexively caught it as she shouldered past him. He stared down at it in his hand. It was too dark to read the lettering, but he recognized the shape and length of the words. _Beef Burrito. Jalapeno and Cheese._

By the time he turned around, Ray was already past the hood of the humvee. Brad hurried after her and grabbed her wrist, yanking her back. “Why?” he said again, but even he could hear that he sounded bewildered this time, rather than angry.

Ray stared up at him warily. She didn’t try to pull out of his grip. “Why the fuck do you think?”

Brad couldn’t answer. He opened his mouth, then shut it.

Ray made a little noise, finally twisting in his hand. “Listen, you don’t have to say it if you don’t want to, but if you’re not going to, then quit dogging me like a jealous asshole.”

Brad defended himself automatically. “I’m not -”

She snorted, yanking her arm up to show him his fingers wrapped around her wrist. “You’re not what?”

Brad didn’t let go. “I’m not doing anything like a jealous asshole. You’re the one fucking with team morale and making a goddamn spectacle of yourself. I’m just trying to keep our collective shit together. I’m trying to protect you.”

“I don’t need you to fucking protect me, dickhead!” Her voice cracked, just a little, like Brad had never heard. “I need you to -” She stopped.

“What?” Brad said, between his teeth. His heart was banging at the inside of his chest. There was something hungry trying to break out of him. “You need me to what?”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him, her pulse hammering as hard as Brad’s under his fingers. She knew the answer to a question Brad barely knew to ask, but she didn’t provide it. She just said softly, after a long moment, “Nothing. I don’t need a fucking thing.”

Brad felt frozen, locked up with frustration and confusion. Finally, he let go of her wrist. She snatched it back, taking a step away from him. An apology tried to form in his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to find the words for it, or the sincerity. It upset him, seeing her rub her arm like he’d hurt her, but at the same time it filled him with a vicious, triumphant thrill. Pain was tangible evidence that something he’d done had made an impact. Everything seemed to bounce off Ray, no matter how hard he hit.

“Don’t do it again,” he said. “Okay?” She scoffed, tossing her head, so he repeated himself, sharper. “ _Don’t_ do it again. I’m warning you.”

“Fine,” she said. “Take the one joy I have left.” Just like that, Brad watched the wall reform. Her armor closed, the momentary vulnerability vanishing. She stopped rubbing her wrist, letting her hands drop.

In the distance, Gunny Wynn hollered, “Oscar Mike in five!”

“Go get in the humvee,” Brad said.

She spun on her heel without another word. Brad watched her go, and only realized he was still holding the MRE when the corner of it burst open under his squeezing hand.

**\- Day Eight -  
**

They didn’t talk about it in so many words, only talked around it, cautiously defining its edges with negative space. Brad had tried to figure out how to be direct, how to say _What do you want me to do? What is this like for you?_ without sounding as earnest as he felt, but he’d come up empty. So he just started the conversation like it wasn’t a conversation, speculating aloud as he and Ray sat alone in the humvee in the blazing sun, waiting for the rest of the team to assemble.

“You’re going to get your rag out here and attract wild dogs.”

Ray glanced at him, wrinkling her nose. “Don’t fucking remind me. Maybe I won’t get it, that’s what I’m hoping. Maybe this isn’t a top of the line model, you know, maybe it’s defective.”

Brad said, “What the fuck ever gave you the impression it might not be? Have you seen yourself?”

She rolled her eyes. “Some people’s parents couldn’t afford to give them Flintstones multivitamins every day, you know.”

“I think developing a meth habit before the age of twelve will interfere with anyone’s adolescent growth.”

“Your biological mother would know.”

It was a comforting little repartee, familiar enough to make Brad smile out his window. Working the wad of dip in his mouth from one cheek to the other, he felt around for the best, most indirect way forward. “Let’s hope your reproductive system is even more jacked up now than it was before. The only thing I can imagine worse than you impregnating someone is you _being_ impregnated. The poor kid might emerge with two heads, or worse, a comprehensive knowledge of Nickleback’s entire discography.”

“Hey, at least in that case I could sell the rugrat as the eighth wonder of the world and make a shitton of money. You know, to support my meth habit.” They grinned at each other, until Ray shuddered. “Seriously though, can you imagine me PMSing?”

Brad replied, “No,” even though he absolutely could, and it looked exactly like Ray on hour thirty-nine of no sleep, pissed off at Brad for being snappy, pretending not to notice potholes while doing forty miles an hour down the road. Contemplating it made him feel an exhausting, preemptive mix of irritated fondness.

“I can,” said Ray. “There’s gonna be tears, I guarantee it. See, this is why they don’t let chicks into the military, dude, because give us a hormonal grudge and access to firearms and all these civilian hajis we’ve been mowing down would be just the tip of the friendly fire iceberg. I want to shoot Schwetje in the face on a _good_ day, who the fuck knows what I’ll do when I’m spraying blood from my genitals.”

 _Us,_ Brad thought. She'd said 'us.' That had to mean something. Aloud, he said, “Ray, they _do_ let chicks into the military.” He refrained from making an illustrative gesture, because, well. Not a good example.

“Oh, yeah, right.” Ray scratched the side of her sunburnt nose. “That’s fucking crazy.”

“Good thing you’re not re-upping,” Brad went on after a moment, cautiously not sounding cautious. “It’s going to take a fucking miracle to get you discharged without a court martial.”

Ray grimaced. “Yeah. This fucking outfit. You grow a pussy _one time_!”

Brad nodded. What he didn’t say, but what they both knew, was that it would be a double and triple miracle if that court martial didn’t end up extending to both him and Fick.

“Man, though, I’ll tell you what,” Ray continued, voice rising in the way that meant a rant was coming down the pipe. “Saddam’s an even bigger retard than I thought if he’s got this kind of shit lying around and he’s deploying it on random Marines instead of selling it at three thousand percent markup to the fucking queers of the Socialist Republic of California, you know what I mean? That motherfucker could bankroll whatever psycho political agenda he wants if he bottled this bullshit and put it on Wal-Mart pharmacy shelves. Fuck, he could single-handedly defeat the U.S. of A. by splashing it in the White House water reservoir and making W’s dick disappear overnight. You think it works the other way around, too? Like if you deployed it on Pamela Anderson, could you turn her into a dude and so thoroughly demoralize the hard-working, honest grunts of the American military that we’d all just turn our sidearms on ourselves and win the war _for_ Saddam?”

Brad pushed his wad of dip under his bottom lip, well practiced at letting the stream of Ray’s monologue roll past him while picking out only the most irrelevant parts. “Ray, do you honestly believe the White House has its own water reservoir?”

Ray shrugged. “I’m speaking hypothetically.”

“You’re speaking retardedly.” But that wasn’t the half of it, and Brad homed in on the only other element he thought he could get away with mentioning. “So you think it was a chemical weapon?”

Ray squinted sideways at him. “What the fuck else could it be?” The words didn’t have much spine, though. There was a distinct quaver of uncertainty to them.

“I don’t know,” Brad said. He rubbed his thumb over his M1’s safety. “There was nothing out there, when we looked. Or when you did.” He’d taken Ray out to the spot, after she’d recovered, when she’d insisted. The only thing to see had been scrubby grass, sand, and dozens of overlaid footprints. A patch of nondescript desert, just like anywhere else.

“What do _you_ think, Brad?” Ray made an airy, dismissive gesture. “An act of God?”

“I don’t know,” said Brad again. “I’d ask if you pissed off God lately, but I think the answer to that is self-evident.”

Ruefully, Ray nodded. “You make a good point.”

Brad felt a victorious little _aha!_ moment: he’d located the correct tactical approach. “Do you think he knows something you don’t?”

“Who, _God_?” Ray snorted. “Probably not, Brad. I received the finest K through twelve education the great state of Missouri has to offer. I can recite all forty-three presidents in order _and_ I know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa’s body.”

“Let me guess,” said Brad dryly. “Lizard people.”

Ray recoiled. “Lizard people conspiracies are inherently anti-Semitic, asshole, not to mention stupid. I would never.”

“Of course, my bad.” They were getting off track. Brad cleared his throat. “About you, though, I meant. Do you think…” He trailed off, then regrouped. “It’s a weird curse to put on someone, that’s all. If it is a curse.”

There was a pause while Ray made the visible decision to take his meaning at face value. “I choose to believe in science and not superstition, my friend. Occam’s chainsaw tells me Saddam dumped some Pinky and the Brain-style bullshit on me and is probably cackling and jerking off in his evil lair about it right now.”

“The likeliest scenario,” Brad agreed. He was losing ground fast, even though he only had a vague idea what the AO looked like. He had to take a direct approach. He blurted the question that had been spinning around his head ever since Q-Tip said it a week ago. “Do you _feel_ like a girl?”

The look Ray shot him spoke a thousand words, but unfortunately none of them were _yes_ or _no._ She reached up, predictably, to pat her chest through her flak vest. “Sure fucking feels like it to me.”

Brad let out a breath. He gave up. He was outmatched and outmaneuvered on this one. “Yeah, okay.” He leaned forward to spit out the window, and changed the subject. “Where the fuck are Trombley and Hasser,” he muttered.

There was a moment of silence. Ray rummaged in the junk on the dash and came up with a water bottle. She cranked the lid off. “I just feel like me,” she said, and tipped her head back to chug half the bottle in one go.

Brad turned to her, surprised. Water overflowed from the sides of her mouth and ran down into her scarf and the collar of her MOPP, carving rivers of clean skin on her dirty throat. It wasn’t something Brad had noticed before, but her Adam’s apple was just a little bump now, bobbing up and down as she swallowed. He could have covered the entirety of it with one thumb, and spanned her whole neck from collarbone to collarbone with his hand. His fingers tightened on his rifle.

“Fuck, homes,” Ray said, breathless, as she lowered the bottle. She stared out the windshield. “What the _fuck_ am I going to do when I get home.”

There was no levity to it. Brad’s heart seized, stricken. He opened his mouth, but before he could even start imagining what to say, the humvee’s back door yanked open and Reporter climbed in, laughing.

“Trombley is one messed up kid, you know that?” he said, jostling Brad’s seat as he scrambled around.

Ray threw the empty water bottle onto the floor and belched. “Don’t need to tell us, dude.”

As Trombley and Walt clattered into the victor, arguing, Brad watched Ray’s mouth turn back into a consciously smirking thing, watched her shoulders lift into brash, skinny pauldrons, watched her shake off uncertainty and sincerity the way she shook water off her hands.

He watched, and felt like he was seeing it for the first time.

**\- Now -  
**

Brad ate the beef burrito. He hated every bite, but he did it. He’d thought, for a very long and real minute, about hurling it out into the desert as hard as he could, but in the end couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was probably the last burrito in camp. If Ray had tossed it to him, apropos of nothing, with a vague story of winning it off Manimal in a game of Go Fish, as she’d almost certainly intended to, he would have relished every mouthful without a second thought. But as much as his stomach rolled at the idea of throwing away Ray’s ill-gotten gains, the flush of petty anger he felt at giving her the satisfaction of seeing him eat it was just as strong. Standing by Pappy’s victor, he folded the packet tight and crammed it into the bottom of his vest pocket. It would keep.

He and Ray didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the night, except when absolutely necessary. Ray _spoke_ , alright, at enormous length and volume, but not to Brad. She spoke to Reporter, to Trombley, to Walt, to Saddam, to God, to Cameron Diaz's ass, to the tax system, to someone named Jerry Hawk who worked at the library in Nevada, to the sky and the dust and the Cobras wop-wopping by overhead, but not to Brad. Which was just fine by Brad.

The Company moved a hundred meters down the MSR, per Battalion’s entirely fucking unnecessary order, and dug in again. Trombley took watch. Reporter crawled back under the humvee in his sleeping bag. Walt laid down in his grave and Ray did the same, flopping into the trench she’d pointedly dug on Walt’s far side, instead of between him and Brad, like she usually did.

“Jesus Christ,” Walt muttered, burrowing deeper into his rucksack.

Brad strained his ears for a follow-up comment, itching for cause to snap at someone, but there was none. Within minutes, everyone was snoring. Brad took himself off to the other side of the humvee, squatted with his back to the bumper, and ate the goddamn burrito in sharp, pissed off bites.

It was fucking delicious.

In the morning, or what passed for morning by the USMC’s draconian standards, Doc came by. The bags under his eyes were darker than usual, his mouth pinched. He nodded to Brad in passing, heading for Ray, who was digging around in the back of the humvee.

“Person,” Brad heard him say.

Ray surfaced, groaning. “Again? Already?”

Doc thumped the satchel he was carrying down on the victor’s tailgate. “Believe me, I’m as fucking delighted as you.” Brad watched him pull out a stethoscope and gesture for Ray to open her vest.

Brad turned away, grinding his teeth. There was just no escape. He avoided watching the exam even from the corner of his eye, keeping his distance from the humvee until Doc left, and only then circled back. Ray was buckling on her kevlar by the open driver’s door, fiddling with the chin strap.

“Everything good?” Brad asked.

Ray shot him a prickly sideways look. “Fucking grand.”

“I’m serious.”

She yanked at the buckle, checking it was solid. “Yeah, so am I.” She reached into the humvee, pulling out the radio handset. “Strapping, healthy, twenty-two year old all-American female, red-blooded and everything.”

Brad frowned, peering over his shoulder after Doc. “Did he…”

Ray blinked, then shook her head. “I’m speculating about the blood. I could be a fucking green-blooded Vulcan at this point, who knows.”

Part of the agreement the four of them had made, Brad and Ray and Fick and Doc, to keep this thing under wraps, was that there would be no permanent record made of anything, for the sake of future plausible deniability. No reports written, even if left unsubmitted, no tangible evidence collected, like photographs or blood. There was no reason for Doc to do it anyway, since he didn’t exactly have a mobile lab hidden in the back of his victor, but the idea still made Brad nervous.

He tapped his thumb against the butt of his rifle, watching Ray fumble with the headset’s cord, trying to loop it behind the velcro at her collar. He reached out to take it from her hands. “Yes, Ray,” he muttered, untwisting the pretzel she’d turned it into. “A cold, logical, intelligent, emotionless Vulcan, that describes you to an uncanny degree.”

She raised her eyes skyward, but held still for him to thread the cord around the edge of her flak vest. “Whatever. I watched wrestling and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a kid, not gay spaceship shit.”

“Cinematic classic gay spaceship shit,” Brad corrected. He clipped the handset to her shoulder. “You’re more like a Ferengi. Whiny, greedy, materialistic, paranoid, fucked up teeth, big ears.” He flicked her earlobe. Then, acting on some impulse that was simultaneously equal parts courage and cowardice, let his thumb rest on the side of her neck, nestled in the dip beneath her ear.

“Ouch,” she said, too late.

“Pussy,” murmured Brad. His back was between them and the rest of the platoon, but a thrill of anxiety shot through him anyway. A sudden thick silence descended over them, muffling the noise of the camp. He watched Ray swallow, and moved his thumb to follow the motion, stroking the length of her throat. Her breath visibly hitched.

“Thank you for the jalapeno and cheese,” Brad said without thinking, then wanted to snatch the words back. He was immediately disappointed in himself. It had felt so good all night to draw out the vindictive pleasure of righteous anger, to punish Ray for her shitty behavior with pointed, judgemental silence, to fortify himself at a safe distance with petty bitterness. But then Ray’s eyes darted up to his, big and dark, wary like they’d been last night, and Brad’s backbone turned to gelatin.

“You’re welcome,” she said, without inflection.

Brad nodded. He dropped his hand and took a step back. Noise enveloped them again, light and movement reappearing from the wings of reality. He cleared his throat, raising his voice to reach Walt and Trombley. “Let’s get squared away, gents.”

Ray’s gaze stuck to him as he turned around. Brad felt it as a sharp, painful presence between his shoulder blades, skewering him. Or maybe that was just the way his chest was clenched tight like a fist.

**\- Day Five -  
**

“So, like…” Trombley said from the backseat, jostling loose-spined from side to side as the humvee clambered along the moonscape terrain. "Does this mean you’re a dyke now?”

They were crawling through a wadi, climbing and banging over rocks and through gravelly ditches, because the road they'd been following three klicks back had unexpectedly petered away into soft sand, the sloping shoulders on either side coming to meet in the middle. The only way forward that didn’t threaten to mire the humvees irretrievably was the firm bottom of a nearby ancient creekbed. Ray drove down it hunched close to the steering wheel, peering over the dash like a vision-impaired grandmother trying to navigate New York City traffic.

“What do you mean _now,_ Trombley?” She grinned, tongue lolling. “I’ve always been a lady-lover.”

“But now you’re a chick,” Trombley explained, like maybe someone had missed a memo. “That makes you a dyke.”

“Ah, semantics.” Ray shook her head, tossing a glance at Brad. He returned her expression of _Can you believe this kid,_ although some of the conspiratorial gravitas was lost to her cartoonishly red, runny nose and eyes.

“You look like shit,” Brad said.

She nodded. “Feel like it too, brother.” Doc had given her an antihistamine shot that morning, just like every other morning, but she seemed to be developing a tolerance to it. Or the dust was getting worse, difficult to say.

“Do you think your girlfriend is going to dump you?” Trombley asked.

Despite the clunking, banging, and rattling of the road, silence somehow still managed to fall over the humvee. Even the faint scratch of Reporter’s pencil ceased. Brad snorted, chewing the inside of his cheek to subdue his helpless grin. He leaned forward to spit dip out the window, timing it between bumps so it wouldn’t end up in his lap.

It took Ray a second to answer. “Nah,” she said. “She’s a real freak, we have threesomes with other chicks sometimes, she won’t mind.”

“You have _threesomes_?” Trombley demanded, although Brad couldn’t tell if he was scandalized or elated.

“Oh, yeah!” Ray said. She peered ahead at the bend of the wadi’s crumbling walls. “Fuckin’ nasty ones. Hey, Brad, that road was supposed to hang a Larry after a few klicks, wasn’t it?”

Brad tucked his rifle under his armpit so he could drag the map board into his lap. He found the little gray line of the track they’d been following earlier and traced it up to where it described a meandering leftward curve. “Yeah.”

“Okay, good.” Ray wiped her nose on the back of her glove, then pointed out the window. “We're veering right up ahead, but I think we can climb over this bank.”

Brad eyeballed the side of the creekbed. “Looks doable. Hey, what was your girlfriend’s name again?”

The silence this time was more localized, but weightier. He watched Ray’s jaw work. “Nancy,” she said at last.

“Nancy, right,” said Brad, nodding. “And her last name?” He pointed through the windshield. “Try it there, that looks more solid.”

Ray obediently steered toward the bank. Brad opened comms to say, “This is Hitman Two One. Be advised, we will be egressing from the wadi on the left bank, all victors hang back until our victor is clear.” A series of acknowledgements came through. When the last one had sounded, Brad prompted, “Ray?”

“Woman,” Ray said, like she was chewing rocks.

“Ah, of course,” said Brad. “Nancy Woman, how could I have forgotten.”

Reporter leaned forward, his incredulous voice rising by Brad’s left ear. “Your girlfriend’s name is _Nancy Woman_?”

“She’s from Canada!” Ray’s voice hit a pitch it never could have before. “Okay, they have some weird fucking names up there!”

Reporter started laughing. “And does she still live in Canada, this Nancy Woman?”

“Yes,” said Ray through gritted teeth. “We don’t see each other very often.”

They reached the base of the bank and Ray didn’t slow at all, plowing straight up the grade at twenty miles an hour, the humvee lurching skyward like it was trying to achieve liftoff. Even over the grinding and crashing of everything they owned lurching around wildly in the back of the vehicle, Brad could still hear Reporter laughing.

**\- Now -  
**

Brad took second watch, after Walt. He was so tired the dark desert swam before his eyes when he propped himself up in the front seat of the humvee, but he knuckled them until they grudgingly cleared, and poured a handful of dry instant coffee into his mouth for good measure. An hour passed where nothing moved except Lilley wandering toward the berm, shitbox in hand. Brad was just starting to consider another handful of coffee when the driver’s door opened and Ray climbed in. Brad turned to look at her, twisting his head away from the night sight of his rifle.

“Hey.”

She replied with a bounce of eyebrows, folding herself up sideways on the seat and shutting the door behind her. She was helmetless, sans flak vest, and didn’t look like she’d slept at all.

“You okay?” Brad asked.

“Dope on a rope,” Ray replied, which meant nothing.

Brad nodded. "You sleep?"

"Nah. Tried to, but I had some kind of out of body experience, thought I was dissolving. It was freaky."

Brad braced the rifle’s butt against his chest so he could rub his thumb into his eye, chasing the headache lurking behind it. "That's called a dream, Ray. You were sleeping. Sleep is good for you."

Ray snorted. "Some doctor tell you that?"

"Several."

She pulled a pitying face that Brad recognized even in the dark, shaking her head. "They're all scheisters, Brad, trying to advance the agenda of Big Pharma and make people foot the bill for their own mind control drugs. Do you know how much my mom spent giving me Ritalin as a kid? No fucking thanks, if I want to guzzle autism-causing, ball-shriveling, mind-numbing communist sedatives, I'll go stand under the jet stream with my mouth open."

Brad digested that. "Ray, are you under the impression that the jet stream is a specific, localized place?"

Ray squinted. A beat passed. "That's not the point, Brad."

“You know,” said Brad, warming to the subject, because at least it was a distraction from his gnawing exhaustion, “I’ve always wondered, in a philosophical sense, what kind of individual might be the ultimate result of a public school that doubles as a gas station and is funded by a combination of streetcorner cocaine sales and the dairy industry, but I see that the answer has been under my nose this whole time.”

She spoke over him, raising her voice. “The _point,_ Brad, is that I’ve transcended the need for sleep. I’ve reached the next plane of evolution. I see all of creation stretching before me. I’m a new -” She swallowed a consonant. “- woman.”

“You don’t smell like one.”

She tipped her head to give him a baleful look.

“At least you’re not a creationist,” Brad allowed, pressing his eye back to his night sight. He scanned the camp, but it was still dead, proverbially speaking.

“Nope, all primordial ooze and survival of the gnarliest for this muchacha.”

“And yet, against all biological sense, your mother didn’t drown you at birth.” Brad rotated sideways to peer into the grainy green shadows behind Fick’s victor, but the flicker of movement he’d seen was just Gunny Wynn rolling over in his grave.

“Really makes you think,” Ray agreed.

A moment of silence passed. Brad listened to it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was the first time they’d been alone together since yesterday, and a sleep deprived Ray was invariably a Ray who had shit to say. Sure enough, right on cue, she sighed loudly, audibly squirming. Brad kept waiting. He heard her head thump against the window.

“I’m fuckin’ hard up,” she said. “That’s why I can’t sleep.”

Brad took a slow, deep breath. He didn’t answer.

“That’s the thing that really fucks with your head out here. We’re totally alone, but we’re never _alone,_ you know? We’re completely abandoned and psychotically micromanaged all at the same time.” Some more rustling. “In the opinion of this marine, that’s some whack shit.”

Brad chanced a look over his shoulder. He immediately wished he hadn’t. “Ray, what are you doing?”

She barely paused in the process of shoving her arm into her fatigues. Her teeth flashed in the darkness. “Combat jack.”

A sensation like acute panic washed over Brad. His hands clenched on the rifle. “Ray…” he said, although he wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a plea.

“What?” She’d slid down in the seat so her head was propped against the bottom of the window. Her thighs were knocked apart, her left knee against the steering wheel. It was too dark for details, but Brad could see the shape of movement between her spread legs. “Puts me to sleep. I hear sleep’s good for you.”

“Fuck,” Brad said softly. His mouth was going dry.

“I mean…” said Ray, but thankfully trailed off. Worse, she made a little noise in her throat, something both hungry and sated, like she’d touched just the right spot, before she went on. “To be honest, I’d better have a shower first if this is going to become an interactive sport.”

Even _that_ couldn’t stop the energetic dispersal of Brad’s blood to all the wrong places. He shut his eyes briefly, but another sound from Ray made them fly back open. Her arm was moving, and as he watched, she lifted her right foot up onto the back of the seat, giving herself more space to move.

“It took me a while to figure out how to do this,” she said, voice clipped with heavy breathing, frayed by the tension in her muscles as she arched against the seat.

“Really,” said Brad weakly, reaching for anything. “You don’t know how to run a pussy? Color me shocked.”

“From this angle!” she protested. “It’s backwards!”

Brad watched her heel slide farther along the top of the seat, her elbow starting to move like a piston. He could hardly breathe. His lungs had taken a backseat to the thundering of his heart and the squeezing, desperate ache in his cock. He dropped a hand into his lap, grinding the heel of his palm against himself. It didn’t help. She must have seen him do it, though, because her next whine was choked off halfway through by the way she said his name between her teeth.

“Yeah,” he breathed, without meaning to. His every instinct told him to respond, to give her what she was obviously asking for, to lean over the radio between them and touch her. His rifle drooped against the window frame, forgotten. “You fucking asshole,” he said, wonderingly.

She had the audacity to laugh. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

Brad pressed at himself again. His cock was so hard, and crammed at a terrible angle into the crook of his hip. It hurt, but he didn’t want to move it. He needed the distraction.

“I was thinking...” she said, stickily. “Do you think I’m a virgin again? Like in the technical sense? This is all untouched territory, after all - or at least it _was…_ ” There was a muffled but distinctly wet sound, and she groaned. It was loud.

“Shut up,” he snapped, breathless. “Shut the fuck up.”

“You have no idea,” she gasped, hips jackknifing, “what this feels like.”

Fuck, but he wanted to. He _wanted_ to. He wanted to get on top of her, pull her thighs around his waist, around his shoulders, put his hands and his cock and his mouth where she was touching herself and find out exactly what it felt like. He’d been thinking about it sideways, backwards, upside-down, any way but head-on, for days. The unfairness of the situation snagged him like a fish hook, how he’d been turning himself into knots to avoid exactly this moment, breaking his own back to keep it from happening, and here she was blithely ruining everything.

“You idiot,” he whispered. “Why don’t you ever fucking _think_?”

“Because it hurts my lady brain,” she whispered back. Her foot slid farther along the seat and touched his shoulder. It was just her boot, dirty and thick-soled, bumping the thick padding of his MOPP. He barely felt it, but it went through him like a shock. It galvanized him.

He shoved his rifle away and turned, pushing up onto the seat. There was barely room to maneuver, but he leaned over the radio, bracing his elbow on top of it. He heard her breath catch, heard her say, “Holy shit, fuck,” her arm stuttering to a stop, like she couldn’t believe it was finally happening.

“Give me your hand,” Brad said, reaching to grab her by the elbow in case she wasn’t sure which one. She pulled her arm out of her fatigues obediently, sitting up halfway in the process. Brad wasn’t gentle, yanking her wrist toward him, turning her wet hand palm-up. He took her first two fingers into his mouth. She moaned at the same time he did, desperately. He hadn’t tasted pussy in months, and his mouth watered for it now. He sucked her fingers, feeling them curl against his roof of his mouth. They were salty, slick, dirty and greasy and delicious. He bit her knuckles.

“Jesus Christ, Brad,” she panted. She leaned toward him, grabbing the collar of his MOPP with her other hand, trembling.

Brad pulled her fingers free with a sloppy sound, and bent to meet her mouth overtop the radio as she tipped it up for him. It was hot, sour, sharp, opening before he could even pretend to ask politely. She bit at him, matching his starved viciousness. Their teeth bumped, then their tongues. He felt her hand slide up from his collar to the side of his neck, and from there toward the back of it. That’s when he drew away. He grabbed her wrist with his other hand, so he held them both, and used them to push her back. She resisted, but he forced her down into the seat.

“That’s enough,” he said. He sounded even rougher than he’d expected - rasping, angry. “No more of this shit. Do you hear me?”

She didn’t reply. She was staring up at him, her suit hanging open, panting.

“We can’t do this, okay?” Brad was aware he was convincing himself, but he _sounded_ sure, and that’s what mattered. “This is fucking insane, we're done here.” He let her go and sat back, reaching behind himself to fumble the door open. With his other hand, he scooped his rifle under his arm, sliding backwards until he could put his feet on the ground outside. “Go the fuck to sleep,” he said, and slammed the door.

When he turned away, all he could see was the silent, shadowed shape of her lying there, heaving for breath, watching him leave.

**\- Day Ten -  
**

“Sergeant Colbert,” Griego called from behind him.

Brad shut his eyes, his heart sinking. Then, alarmed, raised his head quickly from under the humvee hood, peeking surreptitiously around it to make sure Ray was still absent from the vehicle. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the coast was clear, and straightened, turning to meet Griego. “Gunny,” he said, smiling sharply in a way that meant _Fuck off and die._ “What can I do for you?”

Griego wasn’t quite frowning as he approached, but there was a distinct line between his brows. He stopped, head and hip cocked like he was hot shit, hand draped over the stock of his slung rifle. “I’ve been hearing some disturbing rumors lately, Colbert.”

Brad let his smile shade into bland. “Still in the service, then, sir?”

“About your team,” Griego finished.

“Well,” Brad said. He picked up the rag he’d left on the humvee’s bumper and starting wiping oil from between his fingers. “What Trombley does in the privacy of his own rucksack at night is none of my business, so I can’t comment.”

Griego’s mouth pursed. He didn’t lower his voice at all when he said, “About Corporal Person being some kind of tranny.”

Brad kept his expression neutral, but raised his eyebrows very slowly. Fuck, but he hoped Ray was still safely on the other side of camp, digging around under Poke’s vehicle. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“You heard me.” Griego regarded him like a hungry dog waiting for the family cat to make a wrong move. “There’s been talk from H&S.”

Brad let a beat of silence stretch. “From H&S. About Corporal Person - _my_ Corporal Person - being…” He tilted his head. “What, a transsexual? Who managed to get through USMC Medical undetected?”

Griego’s jaw clenched. “I’m just repeating what I heard, Sergeant. There are concerns being raised by Command.”

Brad snorted. The only thing more ridiculous than Griego coming right out with this shit was the insinuation that Command paid even a sliver of attention to the grunt rumor mill. He threw the rag back on the bumper. “Gunny, if you believe everything you hear in this fucking outfit, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve already won the war and every man in this platoon has personally fathered six of Jessica Simpson’s children. What’s your point?”

“This came from a reliable source,” Griego said, but he was starting to look uncertain.

“A reliable source,” Brad repeated, allowing his opinion of _that_ to come through loud and clear, “who told you one of my marines is a tranny.”

“Listen, Colbert.” Griego took on a conciliatory tone, leaning closer. “Obviously it’s ridiculous, no one’s saying it’s not. But what it suggests by association is concerning.”

Brad crossed his arms. “And what does it suggest, besides brain-rotting retardation and that someone in H&S needs a punch in the nuts?”

“That Corporal Person might be a homosexual.”

Brad stared at Griego until he was sure the air between them had reached scalding temperatures. Slowly, he enunciated, “Gunny, I have personally watched Corporal Person jack off to a picture of a woman’s bra strap. If that isn’t the most heterosexual thing you’ve heard in your life, I’m not sure what to tell you.” He mirrored Griego’s posture, leaning in like they were having a friendly, if delicate, gossip session. “It sounds to me like this reliable source in H&S is the one preoccupied with the genitals of other men in the unit. Maybe you should point your inquisition in that direction.”

Griego scowled. “I don’t appreciate what you’re implying, Sergeant.”

“Likewise, sir,” said Brad evenly.

“I want to talk to Corporal Person.”

Brad narrowed his eyes. All other considerations aside, that was too far. “Did you forget about the ‘don’t ask’ part of the rule, Gunny?”

Griego tipped his chin up. “I have unrelated questions for him.”

“About what?”

“That is none of your concern.”

“It is _expressly_ my concern. He’s a member of my team. If you have concerns about his professional conduct, you bring them to me, or to Lieutenant Fick.”

Griego shook his head, lip curling like he’d never heard such rank insubordination. He looked past Brad, toward the rest of the platoon. Brad resisted the overwhelming urge to check over his own shoulder to be sure Ray was staying out of sight. This was a stupid, uphill battle they were fighting, and he knew it. There was no way he could keep every officer other than Fick from laying eyes on Ray forever. Sooner or later, it would come down to Griego, or Encino Man, or fucking Godfather getting a good look at Ray and either pitching some kind of shit fit, or politely saying nothing about the sudden dykey member of their unit. It wasn't impossible; there were weirder looking motherfuckers in the Marine Corps and Brad had met them. Ray’s fate relied entirely on the hope of a fairly outlandish mix of good manners, confirmation bias, and a lack of belief in the miraculous from their superiors. Considering that Schwetje barely knew half the men in the Company's names, maybe it wasn't such a long shot. Unfortunately, Schwetje wasn't their only concern.

“I’ll be speaking to Doc Bryan,” Griego finally said, flicking flinty eyes back in Brad’s direction.

Brad nodded. “I hear he’s got a decent stock of laxatives at the moment, sir, you’re in luck.”

Griego’s eyebrows flew up. He rocked back on his heels like Brad had physically shoved him, his voice dropping to a hiss. “You’re fucking pushing it, Sergeant.”

“Noted,” said Brad, just as quietly.

Griego turned and stalked off in the direction of Lovell’s vehicle. Brad watched him go. When he realized his fists were clenched at his sides, he deliberately relaxed them. Behind him, he heard Walt sidle around the humvee.

“Shit,” Walt said softly.

Brad didn’t turn. “Yeah.”

“Brad…” Walt came up next to him, eyeing Griego’s departure. “This is really crazy.”

“I know.”

“Like, _really_ crazy _._ "

“I _know._ ”

Walt glanced at him, brow furrowed. “Someone’s gonna take it seriously eventually.”

“No, they won’t,” Brad said, without much conviction. Ray just had to hike up her shirt in the wrong direction one of these days and no amount of good-faith scoffing on Brad or Fick’s part could salvage things.

“Casey Kasem’s talking to Doc.” Walt nodded toward where Brad could see Griego gesturing at Doc, who, even at this distance, already looked ready to spit railway spikes.

“Doc won’t snitch.” Brad said it as much to reassure himself as Walt. Doc wasn’t _allowed_ to snitch, up to a point. Patient confidentiality was still a thing, even in the military, although to say they were stretching the reasonable definition of it in this instance was an understatement.

“I’m worried about Ray,” Walt said. Brad glanced down at him, but Walt was still staring after Griego. He looked nauseated, his whole face crumpled with concern.

“Ray’ll be fine.” Another thing he didn’t much believe.

Walt shook his head slowly. “This is so fucked up.”

“I know,” said Brad again. He gave Walt’s shoulder a little squeeze, then turned away, back to the open hood of the humvee. “But what the fuck isn’t around here.”

**\- Now -  
**

This time, Ray didn’t just not speak to Brad, she didn’t speak at all. Walt looked on the verge of panic by the time Brad returned from Fick’s morning debrief, popping his head out of the turret hatch to send a pale, frantic expression in Brad’s direction. Brad ignored him, climbing into the passenger seat. Reporter was already stowed, but Brad noticed his notebook was flattened under his palm against his thigh, rather than open with a pencil poised over it, like usual.

“Where’s Trombley?” Brad asked, pushing the Blue Force Tracker aside so he could wedge the map board next to it.

Ray, already in the driver’s seat with her kevlar jammed down and her scarf pulled up, stared out the windshield and said nothing. Silence stretched.

“Uh, I think he’s taking a shit,” Reporter finally volunteered, sounding uncertain.

“Alright, well.” Brad frowned. “We’re wheels up in ten.” He rubbed his damp left palm down his thigh, settling his rifle in the window to do the same with his right. Fick had been grim during their debrief, distracted and snappish. Brad knew why, or at least could think of twenty different possibilities off the top of his head, and none of them had improved his mood. He wanted to get on the road and get what promised to be a particularly shitty day over with ASAP.

He cleared his throat and swiveled the BFT in Ray’s direction, pointing out their position. “We’ll be following the MSR for twenty klicks, then detouring west into this village here to confirm reports of a Ba’athist ordnance stockpile.” He slid his finger north. “If it’s unfounded, we’ll link back up with RCT1 on the MSR and convoy with them to the hardball south of Baghdad. But if we do find weapons, we’ll wait for engineers from H&S to catch up with us, do a controlled det on-site, then push to locate RCT1 northeast of Baghdad, here.”

He glanced over to make sure Ray was following along, only to find her still staring out the windshield. Her jaw was set, thrust forward belligerently, and her thumb tapped a silent beat against the bottom of the steering wheel. She looked like she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

“Ray!” he snapped. “Pay attention.”

For a second, he thought she was going to continue ignoring him, but then her gaze dragged around. She looked at the BFT screen, not him. “Twenty klicks on the MSR, west to the village, blow some shit up, RCT1, Baghdad. Got it.” Her voice was flat, without even the bite of anger or sarcasm.

Brad stared at her. He’d known better than to think last night’s incident would be without consequence, but he’d expected theatrics, a tantrum of some kind, nasty sideways remarks, shoddy driving, obnoxious singing of songs he hated. The usual backlash when she didn’t get her way, infuriating but ultimately withstandable. This was something new altogether. “Yeah,” he said at last. He wasn’t sure what else to say. He turned the BFT back toward himself. Ray looked out the windshield again.

Nobody said another word until Trombley clambered in a few minutes later. Oblivious to the thick swamp of tension in the vehicle, he said, grinning, “Hey, Captain America’s up on the berm screaming about raghead tanks, he thinks there’s a company of them across the field over there. I think he shit himself.” No one laughed. No one said anything. Trombley looked around, waiting for a response, and when he didn’t get one, slumped in his seat.

Somewhere in the back of the vehicle, a fly buzzed. Reporter tried to cough quietly. In the distance, Rudy and Chaffin led Team Three in an off-key rendition of _Piano Man._ The wind blew sand against the undercarriage of the humvee and flapped the stowed cammie netting. Eventually, Fick gave the rollout order in Brad’s ear. Brad said, “Turn it over, Ray,” and they pulled out.

Brad waited for the jerky driving to start, the unnecessary braking and swerving, but Ray stuck to the middle of the road, kept her foot light on the pedals, and carefully maintained their interval with Poke’s victor. Brad glanced from her to his window and back again. She didn’t turn toward him in response, like she usually would. She didn’t take her eyes off the road. By the time they reached the turnoff to the village, forty-five excruciating minutes later, Brad had cycled through three dozen different emotions and come back around to anger. The mere fact of Ray's silent presence on his left filled him with a muddled, trembling rage. He had to clench his teeth to keep from saying out loud, _You fucking spoiled brat, you don’t just get to have everything you want. Other people exist, too._

Instead of saying that, or anything worse, he fielded Reporter’s sporadic, tentative questions with one-word answers, watched his sector, and sweated in his MOPP. He thought, irresistibly, about last night, the way Ray had looked at him, the taste of her fingers. How she’d leaned into him with her whole body. The invitation of her open mouth and the hand on his neck. The smell and flavor of her, the little catch in her breath when he’d bitten her. And then the dizzy, hollow dread when he left her, like he’d taken a bad step and missed a top stair in the dark. That had scared him, but not as much as kissing her had. He’d been so ready to follow through, and realizing that had chilled him like a bucket of ice water to the face. He’d knelt there holding both their fragile futures in his stupid, selfish hands without a thought in his fucking head.

He shut his eyes, trying to drown out the recursive, hungry drone of his memories. But, inevitably, drawn by their elliptical drag, he circled back to how she had looked leaning on Pappy’s humvee, holding her shirt up for goddamn Manimal. He wondered, swallowing bile, who else she’d been kissing in the dark when he wasn’t paying attention. He was so preoccupied, he nearly missed the turnoff to the village. “It’s coming up on -” he began, twitching guiltily, but Ray was already turning.

“Yeah,” she said, her first word in nearly an hour.

The sound of her voice broke the spiraling trajectory of his thoughts. His stomach cramped with a sudden sensation of flustered ineptitude. “The village is in another five klicks,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” she said again.

“Are we going to get to shoot people?” Trombley asked.

Brad chewed the inside of his cheek. He wished he wasn’t out of dip. He said, “Let’s hope not,” even though the thought of squeezing off rounds filled him with an anticipatory longing. He wanted to _do_ something and watch it have an impact. He wanted to force this stifled, boiling itch out of his body and into the world. He wanted his bike. He wanted to do ninety miles an hour down a deserted highway, helmetless, teeth bared against the wind, feeling nothing but empty and primal and alone.

“I want to fucking shoot people,” Trombley grumbled.

Ray shifted, clenching the wheel like she was about to say something. Brad looked at her reflexively, but she kept staring through the windshield, tight-lipped. The sun was behind her, still low on the horizon. It glinted off the sunglasses balanced on top of her head and outlined her face in gold and shade.

“Shut up, Trombley,” said Brad. He looked out his window.

The village seemed like it was going to be a bust, right up until it wasn’t. Seventeen men, fourteen women, nineteen children, a handful of dogs, and a flock of goats were herded out front of the huts and detained, to varying degrees of success. The goats scattered and the dogs circled in a madly barking frenzy. From the corner of his eye, as he approached the first hut with his rifle at his shoulder, Brad saw a brown dog dart in and snap at Garza’s leg. Garza turned and kicked it, barely slowing.

“Around the back!” someone shouted. Brad veered left to provide cover. The racket of crying children and screaming women washed over him, almost soothing in its familiarity. The men were mostly silent, facedown on the ground with rifles trained on them. Brad sidestepped an open, smoldering cook fire, clearing the area behind the first hut and calling his lack of targets. To his right, he was aware of Trombley and Ray keeping pace with him, hunched over their rifle sights.

“Clear!” Stafford shouted from Brad’s other side, followed by “Clear!” from Doc farther ahead, and “Clear!” from Brunmeier beyond him. A chorus went up, no one finding anything, each hut searched and dismissed one by one, until they came out the other side of the little cluster into open, empty desert.

“No targets,” Brad said, scanning the horizon, but then motion to the east caught his eye just as someone yelled, “Movement right!” He swung around to see a man in a white robe rising from the ground. His arm was drawn back. Something glinted in his upraised hand.

“Grenade!” someone shouted. Three rounds popped off. The man fell backwards, red erupting through his robe, and disappeared from view. The grenade rolled away. For a second, everyone braced for the explosion, but it didn’t come. He hadn’t pulled the pin. Brad scanned the ground where the man had fallen, but saw no sign of the body. All he saw was another twitch of motion. This time, it was the sharp tip of an RPG rising from the earth, followed by a head and a set of shoulders.

“RPG!” Brad shouted. He squeezed off a round, but there was already smoke rising from the man's weapon, and Brad’s shot didn’t make contact. “Hit the deck!”

There was a rush of movement as the platoon scattered, falling flat and ducking behind huts. Brad dropped to the ground just as the RPG whooshed past overhead, going wide, and detonated over the bare ground beside the huts. Sand exploded in every direction. It rained down on Brad’s helmet and back, stinging the bare nape of his neck. He lifted his head, ears ringing, to see booted feet rush past him, a lone Marine charging toward the man who’d fired. He watched, already struggling upright, as the Marine - as _Ray_ \- fired a burst into the man’s head and chest. The man fall back, disappearing as the first one had, but Ray didn’t stop. She ran toward the pit, rifle raised, stance low.

Brad’s whole world narrowed to a pinprick. His breath stopped in his chest. All he could see was the flash of motion as a third man raised his head - and his AK - over the edge of the hidden revetment, aiming straight at Ray. Brad leapt forward, lifting his rifle, but there wasn’t a clean line of sight. Ray was between him and the target. He tried to shout, to call her back, to tell her to drop, but he couldn’t.

And then the platoon swarmed in, and Ray fired, and the man fell like the others had. Brad’s legs were moving, taking him forward. “Ray!” he shouted. She was circling the pit, ahead of the platoon, alone and exposed in the open. He reached her a second after the platoon fanned out to cover the narrow pit, shouting and cursing. Brad glanced in, but barely registered what he saw - a camo tarp pulled to the side, three dead men, piles of weapons, crates of ammunition. He could only see Ray ahead of him, and feel the enormous cold weight of terrified panic gripping him. “ _Ray_!” he said again, and lunged to grab her arm.

She spun around, yanking away from him. “ _What_?” she shouted.

Brad leaned back, startled. She was snarling at him beneath her kevlar. He’d never heard her yell like that before. Not for real. “What the fuck are -” he began, but stopped. The fear and anger dropped right out of him. He was abruptly unmoored, shocked into speechlessness.

She took a step away from him. “Fuck you,” she said. He could tell she meant it - something else he’d never heard. Her eyes glittered, lips peeled back. “Get the fuck off me.”

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked. His voice came out low, strangled. “Are you okay?”

She laughed. It did not sound good. “Yeah, I’m fucking great.”

“What were you thinking, running ahead like that?”

She took another step backward, her rifle lowered and swinging by her side. “I was thinking there was a fucking enemy with a weapon pointed at us.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Brad said. He felt weak with a knee-loosening mix of relief and disbelief. “He could have fucking shot you.”

She tipped her head, raising both arms in a body-encompassing gesture. “But he didn’t.”

Brad gaped at her. He had the distant understanding that if Ray were anyone else right now - if Trombley or Walt or Christeson had pulled this kind of stunt - he would be ripping their ass off and bootfucking them into next week. But somehow, standing here watching Ray retreat from him in every way, her face like a carved mask of animal agony, he didn’t have the first clue what to do. “You can't do that,” he finally said. He heard himself, but didn’t recognize the emotion in his voice. “You scared the fucking shit out of me.”

She scoffed. “Scared? The Iceman?”

Brad became suddenly aware that they were the furthest thing from alone right now, that the men around them were only barely distracted and wouldn’t be for long. Ray’s voice carried at the best of times. "Look," he said. "I'm - I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell. But that was way out of line, you know better." It was objectively the wrong move, not the sharp disciplinary tone he should have adopted to handle her insubordinate behaviour, if not her recklessness, but objectivity wasn't something he was capable of right now. Not anymore.

She regarded him, silent for a long moment. He had the sickening feeling she was judging something about him he barely understood existed. "Apparently I don't, Brad," she said at last.

He stated back at her, at her sharp, glinting eyes. He didn't know what to say. Finally, without another word, she sidestepped him and headed back toward the huts. Brad turned, feeling dazed, to watch her go. Fick was hurrying toward them, talking urgently on his headset, as the men behind Brad called an all-clear on the pit. She brushed past him, head ducked. Fick glanced after her. When he looked back at Brad, his face was thunderous. Brad knew that he should brace himself, but he couldn’t seem to gather his reins enough to even affect an unconcerned expression as Fick approached.

“What the hell was that?” Fick asked, peering around Brad at the platoon hooting and hollering as they climbed triumphantly in and out of the pit.

Brad didn’t think Fick meant the three men who’d just gotten the drop on them. “I don’t know,” he said, staring after Ray as she vanished between the huts. A twinge of guilt knocked at the back of his mind. He _did_ know. He just didn’t want to say it.

“Well you need to handle it.” Fick’s voice dropped. He leaned closer. “We’ve got H&S and Schwetje crawling up our ass in a few minutes, you better have this situation squared away by then. I have other shit to deal with right now.”

Brad’s already knotted stomach sank ever further. “Yes, sir.”

He glanced back to be sure the platoon was under control, then headed after Ray. He found her by the humvee, head tipped back to chug a bottle of water. She didn’t look at him as he approached, but he knew she was aware of him by the tightening of her shoulders and the way she crumpled the bottle in her fist when it was empty. She threw it through the window into the vehicle.

“Ray…” Brad said. He checked over his shoulder, but they were functionally alone. Leon, Rudy, and Stafford were guarding the civilians twenty meters away. “We can’t do this right now.”

She started busying herself digging through the packs strapped to the outside of the humvee. “Can’t do what?” Her voice was flat.

Brad grimaced. “ _This,_ I don’t know.” He raised his hand off the stock of his rifle, but dropped it before he could make a damning gesture between them. “Whatever the fuck _this_ is.”

She threw a look over her shoulder. “ _This_ isn’t anything, obviously.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brad said. It was occurring to him more with each passing moment just how fucked up everything was. How useless he was at all of this. How absurd that they couldn’t sort this shit out like adults, quickly and simply and rationally. “Look, I’m trying, okay? I don’t know -” He stopped, swallowed. He dropped his voice, even though he didn’t need to. “I don’t know what to do, here. I don’t know what you want from me.”

Her hands stilled in the process of opening a backpack he was pretty sure didn’t even belong to her. “You don’t know,” she said. It didn’t sound like a question.

“No, I…” Brad floundered. “I’m trying to do the right thing, but you’re making it fucking difficult.”

She turned around, her eyebrows raised nearly to her hairline. “ _I_ _’m_ making it difficult?”

“Yes!” Brad said. “You’re all over the goddamn place, I don’t know what’s going on with you. Are you -” He stopped, just in time, but the damage was already done.

Her mouth dropped open. “Brad Colbert,” she said, dangerously low. “Were you just about to ask me if I’m PMSing?”

“...No,” he lied.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Wow, my mom was right. Who knew.” She shook her head. “You’re a piece of fucking work, you know that? Every time I think I’ve seen it all from you, shit gets more real. It’s a fucking talent, Brad, did you go to school for this, or is it a natural aptitude?”

“You can’t put all of this on me. I said I was sorry.”

“For _what_?” She took a step closer to him. “What are you sorry for?”

He looked down at her, her pinched, angry face, her thin mouth, her scowling eyebrows. He just needed to fix this - viscerally, simplistically. Some instinctive part of him wanted to pull her against him and bypass this mined landscape of bad wording and worse actions altogether, to communicate in the most basic and unmistakable of ways - with his hands on her shoulders and her body pressed against his. He remembered the feel of her from last night, the eager and surprising gentleness of her touch. How correct it had felt, what a relief it had been, and then, abruptly, what a frightening danger.

He realized there were two ways he could play this: he could use the blunt force of his rank and the excuse of their situation to force things into a simulacrum of the shape he wanted - technically functional, functionally miserable. Back to how things had been all day- not speaking, pretending nothing had happened, ignoring everything until it inevitably became the sort of festering sore that couldn’t be lanced, only amputated. He saw the inevitable result of that decision spooling out into the future: the angry silences and eventual awkwardness becoming insurmountable; the two of them going their separate ways after deployment, if they were both lucky enough to come through unscathed; never speaking again except during the occasional excruciating unit reunion. They’d move on and live their lives and become nothing but a bizarre and unpleasant memory to each other, this problem left unsolved, these questions left unanswered. It was probably the easiest solution, and the one he needed to make, for a thousand different practical and logical reasons.

But there was also the other option.

“I’m sorry for fucking things up,” he said, after a long pause in which Ray glared at him expectantly. “I’m sorry for making things weird and going along with something I didn’t understand.” It didn’t seem enough, not nearly, but he must have been on the right track, because Ray’s mouth snapped shut and her expression transformed into one of cautious surprise.

“Something you didn’t understand,” she repeated slowly. “What the hell was that?”

He forced himself not to cringe. “I don’t -” he began, but stopped. He was aware his mouth was open and nothing was coming out. The words eluded him. The _thoughts_ eluded him. He felt helpless, a stammering idiot in a new land, unable to speak the local language or comprehend the currency. This was fucking humiliating. He hadn’t been in this position, forced to verbally express his own social failings and mystifying insecurities, for so many years, he’d almost forgotten how horrible it felt. This exact situation was why he’d sworn off the practice altogether. Or, well… Maybe not this _exact_ situation. Besides the obvious differences in particulars, there was a new - or maybe a very old - feeling creeping through him. It was hard to pin down, but he’d been circling it for days. Possibly weeks. Possibly longer. Looking at Ray’s wary, almost hopeful face, it finally dawned on him what it was.

He wanted to _try._

“Brad,” Ray said, softly.

He shut his eyes. The words were there, he just had to find them. “I need to keep you safe,” he began. That was the easy part, the obvious part. “This situation is a timebomb that’s going to go off one way or another, and I have to keep it contained. But I can’t do that when you’re - when you’re -” He paused. He opened his eyes to see Ray looking back at him. He took a breath. “When you keep doing all this shit you’re doing. I get it, things are messed up, but you have to save this bullshit for back home. I can’t protect you from everything else and yourself, there aren’t enough hours in the day.” God, it was raw to admit it like that. The words curdled on his tongue like bitter failure.

“What bullshit?” Ray said. She appeared genuinely baffled.

“Come on,” said Brad. The words were coming easier now that he’d pulled the plug, like a drain unclogged and starting to run freely. “All the shit you’ve been doing with the guys. I’m…” He fiddled with the stock of his rifle, digging his thumbnail into a groove. His skin crawled. He felt like he was handing Ray a knife and turning his back. It made him want to turn on his heel and forget this whole thing was happening, but of course there was no point half-assing things. And besides, since when had he been unable to trust Ray at his back? He regrouped. “I can’t be part of your experimental heyday. I can’t handle it, Ray. I just can’t.”

She threw up her hands, curling them halfway through the gesture like she wanted to wrap her fingers around his throat, or maybe aggressively rub her own temples. “You keep saying that, but what the fuck do you mean? _What_ experimental heyday?”

Brad made his own frustrated gesture. He felt hot and desperate, nauseated by the anxious misery that had been churning in his gut for days. He wanted to vomit it out, throw it at her feet, force her to see what she’d been doing to him, even if he barely understood it himself. “You’re obviously a fucking queer. This seems like the perfect excuse, doesn’t it?”

The thought had felt, nebulously circling his mind for days, like the truth, but as soon as he said it, he wanted to take it back. The words seemed to hang in the air between them, cruel and sharp, almost nonsensical. His ears rang with shock.

Ray leaned away from him. She was pale beneath her sunburn and the faded roughness of the coffee burn on her left cheek. “The perfect excuse for what?” she said, softly, like she wanted to shout but was being throttled.

Brad said, quieter, apologetic, “For fucking whoever you want to in this Company.”

Ray stared at him. Her voice regained some strength, flavored with indignation. “What the _fuck_ are you talking about? I haven’t fucked anyone since we were in Australia last year.”

Brad hesitated. “Fuck, suck, stick your tongue down their throat, whatever.”

Ray’s face screwed up into a rictus of horrified disgust. "Jesus, Brad," she said. "You're the only one who's gotten anywhere near me, are you fucking joking?"

Brad's brain skipped. "Oh," he said, not with comprehension, but something much more confusing. He was starting to realize, in a solid and literal sense rather than merely an emotional one, that perhaps he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. "Well… How the fuck was I supposed to know that?"

“By asking!” Ray's voice, surpassing mere indignation, was starting to rise. “Or by using your goddamn eyes and your common fucking sense!”

"I did use my goddamn eyes," Brad said, hissing to compensate for her increase in volume. "And my goddamn eyes saw Manimal jerking off on your tits."

She rolled her eyes. "It was not _on_ my tits. I told you, that was a strictly hands-off exchange of goods and services."

Brad rolled his eyes right back. "Yeah, sure, whatever. My point is, you're making a goddamn mess and putting us all in danger with it. If you get caught - if someone gets pissed off enough or just wants to brag -" He trailed off.

Ray shook her head. She laughed, that same brittle humorless sound, but sharp this time with anger. "Nah. No way, I don’t buy it. You're fucking jealous, that's all this is."

It was Brad’s turn to recoil. His vision whited out for a second. “That’s not - No. I’m -” he said.

Ray pointed her finger right in his face. “You’re full of shit. You're being a controlling, jealous dick, because you're too much of a pussy to admit you want to - to fuck me." Her voice stuttered on the last part.

Brad glowered. It wasn’t the first time she’d said that to him. His instinct was to snap back, to defend himself from what sounded like baseless accusations of blundering incompetence. He took a deep breath instead. "I did admit it," he said. "What do you think I was doing last night?"

She snorted. There was a faint tremble to it. "It looked like you were running away like a cockteasing little bitch."

Ah, right. Brad looked into the distance over Ray's head for strength and instead found dust rising off the horizon. H&S and Hitman closing fast, goddamnit. "I was…" He chewed the inside of his lip. "I was trying to do the right thing. I didn't want to…"

"To what?" The tremble in Ray's voice increased. "To start some shit you didn't want to finish? To make me think you finally -" Her words broke.

Brad’s eyes shot to her, alarmed. She was staring sideways at the humvee, jaw clenched. There was a distinct wetness at the corner of her eyes. "Ray," he said, quietly, shocked. "I didn't… I just…"

"Don’t. I get it," she said. She glared at the door of the humvee like she was trying to burn a hole through it. "I do. It's too fucking weird. I'm still _me._ "

"It's not that." Brad was surprised, saying it, to realize it was the truth. Or maybe he was just surprised to hear himself admit it. "It's not _you,_ it's -"

"If you finish that sentence with 'it's me,' I'll strangle you to death my bare hands."

Brad clenched his jaw with frustration. "It's this _situation._ It's not what you’d call fucking ideal, is it?"

Ray shrugged. "It’s never going to be. What's an 'ideal situation,' Brad? Once we're back home, on opposite sides of the country, or the planet? When maybe I've changed back and you won't even -”

Brad took a step forward. He didn’t mean to, really, but that crack in her voice made him inclined to do all kinds of things he normally never would. “I don’t know,” he said. He lowered his head, trying to catch her eye, but she kept staring at the humvee. “I just know it’s not here. But I do - I do want to.” He exhaled shakily. His head spun with the strange release of saying it out loud.

Ray’s gaze finally darted to his. There were no tears, but Brad could tell it was close. He wanted to touch her face, rub his thumbs over her cheeks, see her dimples again. He almost reached for her, but hesitated. She was still on her guard.

“Yeah, you say that now, but are you going to turn tail the second we get home, like you did last night?”

Brad shut his eyes for a second. “I’m not good at this, Ray.”

She snorted. “Oh, really? Fucking thank you, Brad, I hadn’t noticed. You’re usually such a shining beacon of emotional competency.”

“But I’m _trying,_ ” he continued, overtop her. “I’m legitimately trying, here.”

“Yeah, that’s the sad part.”

“Goddamnit.” Brad took another step, so she was between him and the humvee and had to tip her head back to look at him. He glanced quickly at the dust cloud of H&S getting steadily closer. “Listen to what I’m saying to you.” He grabbed her shoulder, giving her a shake. “I’m telling you I’m trying. That I _want_ to try. Me. Trying.”

“Trying to _what,_ though?” Ray let him shake her, peering up at him. “Trying to get in my pants?”

“Well, yes.” It was the wrong answer. He watched the gate, which had been slowing inching open, slam shut behind her eyes again. Shit. “But not just that, I -” He clenched his teeth. “I also - We could - I’d like to -”

“Jesus Christ,” Ray muttered. She looked into the middle distance past Brad’s shoulder as though consulting an invisible but sympathetic deity. “This is fucking incredible. It really is.”

“I could - love you,” Brad finally said. He nearly collapsed with the effort of it, the taste of the goddamn words. But it was worth it for the way Ray’s eyes flew back to his, her eyebrows leaping up her forehead.

“ _What?_ ” she said.

“You heard me.”

She gaped. “Yeah, I fucking heard you, homes, but I think I’m having a stroke. You did not just say what I think you just said.”

“Yes, I did.”

They were silent, staring at each other. Strangely, Brad’s heart wasn’t pounding anymore. He felt… calm. He felt victorious, vindicated. He slid his hand up from Ray’s shoulder to the side of her neck, stroking his thumb over the tiny, tender knob of her Adam’s apple. It bobbed when she spoke.

“Say it again.”

Brad breathed in, slow and deep. He held her gaze. “I could love you. I think I might already.”

She blinked, and then blinked again. “Shit,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Brad agreed. He breathed deep, and exhaled. “I’m not fucking with you.” He rubbed his fingers into the back of her neck, beneath her kevlar. “Do you believe me?”

A second passed. Her pulse pounded under his palm. Shakily, she nodded.

“Okay,” Brad said. “Okay, good.” There was giddiness flooding him, an adrenalized euphoria. He was fucking omnipotent, unkillable. He could do _anything._ And what he did was lean toward her, drawing her in, until she went pliant in his grip and swayed against him. Before he kissed her, he said, “When we’re home, that’s when we’ll figure it out. I promise.”

She swallowed, already lifting her mouth to him. “Yeah, fucking right we will,” she said, and raised onto her toes to kiss him first.

It was as good as last time - better. Even in broad daylight, with only the humvee and Brad’s shoulders between them and the platoon, even with the exhausting strangeness of the day and the promise of more exhausting strangeness to come, everything except the quick hunger of her mouth vanished. Brad held her gently under the jaw and felt her arms slip around his neck at the same time her tongue slipped into his mouth. He groaned as much with gratifying resolution as arousal. She was exactly right against him, perfectly sized, perfectly shaped, perfectly suited. That sensation from the night before returned like a puzzle piece slotting home: he was precisely where he should be, finally doing something smart and correct, something inevitable.

In the distance, beyond the muffled racket of the civilians and the platoon, he heard the growl of the approaching vehicles. He heard Ray’s fast breathing as they pulled apart. They looked at each other, too close but still not close enough. Brad slid his thumb along the edge of her jaw. His stomach was hot with a jumble of indecipherable instincts.

“Wow, dude,” Ray whispered, her hands tight on his shoulders. “That was really fucking gay.”

Brad stared at her, and then slowly his face cracked into a smile. He laughed, softly. “Ray, you idiot,” he said, leaning down to kiss her one more time. “It’s not gay if one of us is a woman.”

 


End file.
